“This raises the question of whether religious rituals of absolution, in which people are absolved of their sins and released from guilt, would actually make people less prosocial.”

In a study done by the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, published in the journal Religion, Brain and Behaviour, researchers posed the question: “If sin is a form of capital, might absolution rituals squander that capital?”

In the study, volunteers – all devout Catholics —were provided two memory tasks.

First, they were asked to remember a sin, privately, that they had committed in the past.

Secondly, they had to recall if they attended confession for this sin or, if they hadn’t done it in reality, just to imagine doing so.

Each person was given an opportunity to donate to a local Catholic church by putting some money in an envelope.